Angry Birds is a simple but completely addictive game. The bad pigs have stolen the bird’s eggs. So the birds have nominated various types of kamikaze volunteers that you sling-shot over to the pigs’ fortress to destroy them. Cartoonish violence, nothing gory, and I have no trouble with even the youngest members of my family watching this game.

Mashable has kindly sifted through a bunch of YouTube videos for us, and has returned a list of the 5 optical illusions that provided the biggest “Whoa” moment. A fun way to spend a few minutes.

Have you seen the spinning ballerina optical illusion? Seems she’s everywhere lately. I honestly didn’t believe that she spun in both directions until one day … there she was going the other way. Turns out that once you learn the secret, you can pretty much make her change direction at will. And no, it’s not an indication of your right or left brain-ed-ness. Just an extraordinary illusion.

If you’re a Twitter fan, you know that frequent outages come with the territory. If you’re not familiar with Twitter trivia: the indicator of an outage is a whale being hauled up by little birds. From Mashable comes a link to a Flash animation by Nadav Yaron, a creative manager at a gaming company in Isreal who has articulated the thoughts of the fail whale.

It’s official, there is a free Kindle app for reading e-books on a Droid! I am excited beyond words. First off, because I am a huge fan of reading material. And second, because it ROCKS that Droid has so many apps available for free from their marketplace. Free is extraordinary.

I am not a big fan of passing on those dire warnings about some “new” virus that in actuality has been around for years. But this particular warning was reported on Alltop from Mashable, two sites I trust, and has only been circulating since Friday, May 28, 2010. By now we’re all pretty skeptical of these types of scams, but apparently this one is looking unusually credible.

If you receive a post on your Facebook wall about the Most Hilarious Video Ever, do not install the player or provide your login details. Here you can find the details from Websense Security Labs, generously posted to YouTube.

Not that I had any doubts. But a study out of the UK quantifies that people’s sense of freedom is increased by 15% and their happiness by 10%. The extraordinary finding is the list of those that benefit most, and why:

The synopsis in Mashable reports that: “The results indicate that those who benefit most from IT access are women, individuals in lower income households and those with less education. The institute argues that this is because ‘IT helps to promote and enable empowerment and autonomy.’ For women specifically it serves as an important ‘social and family network support tool.'” [See the report, subsection 3.3 for more detail]

My personal observation is that in the US, the, “social and family network support tool,” has allowed more women to work from home. The opportunity to have both a meaningful career and be an accessible mom has a significant effect on their overall satisfaction. Follow this link to read the entire BCS report.